For B2B companies, implementing an effective marketing strategy is crucial to engage your target audience, nurture leads, and ultimately drive sales. However, with the breadth of channels, platforms, and tactics available today, marketing can quickly become complex and overwhelming.
The key is leveraging the right tools and software to streamline your efforts.
Marketing software doesn’t replace marketers – it makes good marketers great.
Brian Halligan, CEO of HubSpot
To help you focus your B2B marketing technology stack, here are the 10 most essential tools and platforms to consider in 2024:
Table of Contents
Content Marketing Platform: StoryChief
With StoryChief, you can manage every aspect of content marketing: briefing, assigning, writing, SEO and readability optimization, reviewing, approving, and publishing. Plus, you can promote your blog content across multiple channels, including social media, your email newsletter, and employee advocacy.
Pricing: Plans start at $220 per month for Teams, $40 per month for individuals, and $440 per month for agencies. See all plans here.
CRM & Sales Enablement: HubSpot
Combining a CRM platform for managing contacts and deals with sales enablement functionality, HubSpot aims to grow with businesses from first lead to customer growth. Useful features include contact/company records, email tracking, email marketing campaign creation, landing page/form builders, meetings scheduler, and more.
With robust integration capabilities, HubSpot can centralize your marketing, sales and customer success efforts for maximum transparency and efficiency.
Email Marketing: Mailchimp
Email marketing remains an essential component of lead nurturing and driving repeat business. With email deliverability challenges plaguing the inbox, having a dedicated email marketing platform is key.
Trusted by millions of businesses, Mailchimp makes beautiful, mobile-optimized email campaigns easy. Useful features include sign-up forms/landing pages, drag-and-drop email design, automation workflows, and insights through open/click tracking.
Social Media Management: Sprout Social
With 4.65 billion social media users worldwide, having a consistent presence on platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook is key for B2B brands. Sprout Social allows you to schedule and queue content across platforms from one dashboard to save time.
Useful features include post scheduling, audience analytics, competitive benchmarking, influencer identification, image editing, hashtag tracking, and integrated reporting.
Lead Scoring: LeanData
For businesses struggling to determine sales-ready leads among the influx of inbound inquiries, LeanData’s lead scoring and routing capabilities are invaluable. Automatically score every lead based on characteristics like demographics, engagement metrics, website behavior, and more.
Then, use these insights to automatically route qualified leads to the right sales rep to ensure best fit. This prevents overflowing sales inboxes while helping identify and act on hot leads faster.
Search & Content Discovery: Buzzsumo
Creating targeted and engaging content requires understanding what resonates with your audience and drives shares. BuzzSumo makes this easy by allowing you to analyze any topic or competitor domain for high-performing content ideas in minutes.
Compare content performance by type, format, headline style, publish date, and more to optimize your own content for maximum impact. You can also monitor keyword/topic performance over time to identify new opportunities.
Graphic Design: Canva
Creating visually compelling graphics, social posts, infographics, ads, and more doesn’t require advanced design skills. Canva provides professionally designed templates around any brand, industry or need.
With a few clicks, customize fonts, colors images and elements. Canva is also optimized for social media assets with exact dimensions for every platform and post type.
With both free and paid plans, Canva ensures marketing teams have visually cohesive and effective assets at their fingertips.
Presentation Software: Visme
Bring your collateral like one-pagers, research reports, whitepapers and pitch decks to life with Visme’s interactive and visually engaging presentation software. Avoid boring slides and complex design tools with beautiful templates, 30M+ customizable elements, and powerful features.
Animations, charts/graphs, illustrations, photos, and dynamic shapes can be added in just a few clicks. Visme also includes dozens of interactive templates for infographics, documents, maps, certificates, menus and more.
SEO & Content Optimization: SEMrush
Understanding the changing search landscape and aligning your content to rank high organically is crucial for owned-media initiatives.
SEMrush provides comprehensive keyword data including volume, difficulty, CPC, and competition level analysis to identify opportunities. Beyond keywords, analyze pages/domains for issues impacting performance like speed and mobile optimization.
Integrations with Google Analytics and Search Console also help you track rankings over time and benchmark against competitors for continuous content optimization.
Project Management: Asana
With numerous platforms, campaigns and initiatives running simultaneously, following up on tasks and deliverables can quickly fall through the cracks. Asana provides a centralized dashboard to coordinate your marketing projects and communicate with stakeholders.
Easy-to-configure workflows, reminders, comments and attachments keep all assets, notes and conversations organized per task. Dashboards and reporting allow you to track progress towards deadlines and ensure accountability across the team.
The Power of B2B Marketing Tools
Streamlining your B2B marketing tools stack with platforms purpose-built for B2B marketers is essential for executing high-performing campaigns at scale without the complexity. Plus, open APIs allow platforms like HubSpot to integrate with other vital tools missing from this list like analytics, sast tools, events management software and more.
The key is identifying gaps in your existing tech stack, then evaluating options based on functionality, ease of use, AI capabilities, flexibility, and cost. As your needs evolve from a fledgling startup to an enterprise B2B organization, having scalable platforms ensures you can grow without having to start over.
By tapping into the platforms above for content creation, distribution, campaign execution, and performance optimization, B2B marketers can focus on strategy rather than getting bogged down in operational details. Go a step further and incorporate a digital business card to your marketing campaign to share content and ads with your network. The result is increased productivity, transparency, and ultimately, accelerated revenue growth powered by marketing’s full potential.
